Spelling Ideas

Spelling Squares - Pass out a blank sheet with 12 premade squares on it. (Or however many words your spelling list has) The students must put 1 spelling word in each box underlining the phonograms. Once they are done, they cut out the boxes. We store them in zip lock backs and they are sent home Thursday to help study for the test Friday. Then students can sort them (word families, rhyming words, ABC order).

Rainbow Words - As part of my first grade morning routine, I have my students do Rainbow Spelling Words. They trace their spelling words everyday with a colored pencil. At the end of the week, they have practiced writing them 5 times, as well as worked on handwriting.

Spelling and Phonemic Awareness - I also use our weekly spelling words as the words we use for our Daily Phonemic Awareness Activities including:
* Recognizing and producing Rhymes
* Segmentation of Words into Syllables
* Awareness of Initial Consonant Segments
* Awareness of Final Consonant Segments
* Segmentation of Onset and Rime
* Phoneme Segmentation
* Blending of Syllables and Phonemes
* Phoneme Manipulation – adding and deleting phonemes

Just Added My Blog to Edublogs!

Find a Friend!

I just found the greatest idea for a first day activity.  It is called Find A Friend.  Students will walk around the room and find a friend that fits the category.  I found it on First Grade Best blog.  Here is the link. 

http://firstgradebest.blogspot.com

Here is the document I created for our Vocabulary notebook.

Vocabulary Notebook HM Theme 1-5

Vocabulary Notebook

Research by Robert Marzano indicates the nature and critical need for direct instruction in basic vocabulary.  Basic vocabulary includes the high-frequency terms that are critical to an understanding of the English language.  At least two groups of students require direct instruction in these terms: students of poverty and English language learners (ELL).  When schools understand the importance of school-wide direct vocabulary instruction, the playing field is leveled between language deprived students and other students.  Research indicates that, when students learn vocabulary terms and relate them to semantic clusters of words similar in meaning, long-term memory of vocabulary is significantly increased.  In contrast, there is no scientifically-based research to support the teaching of vocabulary words in isolation (memorizing a weekly word bank) and hoping the instruction sticks.

This year my students will be keeping a vocabulary notebook.  The notebook will be divided into sections organized in semantic clusters based on the Houghton-Mifflin curriculum that our district uses.

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A special kind of class: Alphabetical Order

A special kind of class: Alphabetical Order This is soooo cute. We just finished our famr unit but I love this.

Farm Unit

We started our farm unit by creating a KWL Chart in the shape of a barn.  On the chart, I only write what we know and what we wonder.  We write what we learned on chart paper during our morning message.

We created a list of farm animals.  When I wrote the list, I left off the beginning sound.  My students helped me fill in the beginning sounds.  We then talked about some of the animals on a farm and their jobs.  I was careful not to discuss that we eat some of hte farm animals.  So I let my students come up with the answers.  The cat catches mice.  Goats give us milk.  Dogs help the farmer keep the animals from roaming away.  Horses are for riding.  Chickens and ducks give us eggs.  Cows give us milk.  Sheep give us wool to make clothes.  And my favorite answer is pigs roll in the mud.  So of course we talked about why pigs roll in the mud - to keep cool.  It is the same as applying sun tan lotion.

We learned about what characteristics a bird and a mammal have.  We than classified fram animals by those characteristics.

We read a book about farms and listed what a farmer does.  Wow!  Farmer sure are busy.  We talked about how most of our food comes from farms and how important farms are.

We discussed crops that gorw on farms.  We defined what is a fruit and what is a vegetable.  We than sorted pictured of crops into categories - fruit and vegetables.  (Fruits have seeds and vegetables do not).